GENERAL CABLE NEWS

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 184, 13 April 1915, Page 5

GENERAL CABLE NEWS

riBE AT NAPLES. COTTON STOCKS DESTEOYED. (Eee. 8.50 a.m.) EOME, April 12. By a lire at Naples 6000 bales of cotton, valued at £BO,OOO, were destroyed. ON THE FIRING LINE. "EYE WITNESS” IS VIVID. I (Time 3 and Sydney Sun Cables). LONDON, April 12. "Eye Witness” deseribes. how th|e fighting is controlled by the superior commanders. The brigade commanders, he says, will probably be ensconced in dug-outs, cellars, or rdielters within a few hundred yards of the firing line, a telephone connecting them! with the battalion head-quarters, through which information is passed to tho army headquarters, which consists of a farm-hotise, situated a mile from the firing line. Inside this house everything fi eems to depend upon maps upon which is recorded every change in position as reports from the front arrive and the struggles are made partially clear. One message, for instance, tells how a battalion was checked in front of the enemy; and perhaps the next tells that some brigadier has sent the last cf Ids reserves to work round to the 'flank. A third message may notify the capture of prisoners. The nussr-ge comes through a volume of sound. Then thees is a period of suspense until the next report states laconically that a counterattack has been repulsed. Throughout the hours of darkness flares rise in the sky over the battlefield, and the beams of the searchlights occasionally wander across,lighting up tli© battered parapets, showing dark patches of blood and the still forms of the dead lying or k-ilf-immer-se-d in the water filling the ruined trenches. Near at hand the darkness is pierced by flashes of fire; while faraway on the front the flashes cf the gun discharges ar G reflected in the sky like the play of summer lightning.